Mount Abu,
India
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Once again we had the privacy of a jeep to take us through the desert, past villages and little towns, watching teams of women in their saris using pick axes to repair the sides of the roads or break up rocks to make gravel - in the monsoon season this must be an even more awful job! The terrain became more mountainous and we eventually reached the bottom of Mount Abu, Rajasthan's only hill resort. It is where many of the princely rulers had their summer houses built and then the British used it as a retreat too. The jeep painfully climbed up the windy roads to the top of the 1700m hill. We pased lots of monkeys lazing in the sun. Up on the mountain, we found basically the equivalent to Scarborough without the sea. This is where the Gujaratis and Rajasthani families who can afford to, come for a little holiday. It is especially visited by honeymooners who may have only met a few days before at their wedding and you could see couples walking awkardly around sometimes holding hands whilst examining the tourist tat for sale and visiting the ice cream parlours. All very tacky and we sat watching them watching us! We went to visit the 1000 year old Jain temples - all carved from marble brought up the huge mountain by elephants. Quite stunning!
The hotel was really awful and freezing cold, the beds were like rocks and there were quite a few power cuts (mind you that is not unusual as for the next few days the power kept going out in all the places we visited - apparently the whole of Rajasthan (an area much bigger than Gt Britain) experienced a power cut. After a 5 hour journey to get here and a much longer one to our next destination, it seemed like a long way to go for a very uninspiring afternoon.
